A new breed of robot can crawl around like an insect, undulate like a jellyfish, run like a cheetah, and walk like a human.

Bio-Bots: 9 Wild Nature-Mimicking Machines

Bio-Bots: 9 Wild Nature-Mimicking Machines

In the past decade labs around the world have become lousy with crawling, skittering, leaping machines as researchers look increasingly to the natural world for inspiration. This isn't an entirely novel phenomenon—one of the first recorded automatons was a mechanical duck that appeared to defecate. What's noteworthy today is the sheer quantity of biologically inspired bots and diversity of capabilities. Most of these bio-bots are experiments in different kinds of locomotion—attempts to make robots that maneuver less like unmanned vehicles and more like beasts. Here's a look at the robots whose progress, and animal-derived movements, we're tracking.

Petman

Petman

Locomotion: Bipedal

Creator: Boston Dynamics

A few short years ago, Honda's Asimo seemed like the only horse in the race to build a bipedal robot, one with the gait and all-terrain versatility of a two-legged human. Today, the field is rife with competitors, and the Pentagon is funding numerous efforts to push new humanoid bots, including a firefighting model scheduled to begin testing next fall.

For now, the most impressive bipedal bot we've seen is from Petman. This Boston Dynamics robot is designed to act as a kind of walking, running, squatting mannequin, to test the mobility and durability of military-grade protective gear without exposing human guinea pigs to lethal substances. Asimo might be stable, but Petman is also fast. It jogs and ascends stairs with confidence. Its test-dummy role is likely only the beginning; the future of co-robots, or bots that live among people, could hinge on the ability to replicate humanoid mobility.